Quote Originally Posted by saaya View Post
makes sense, and ati had more time to tweak their design than nvidia...
and they have more experience with tweaking 40nm and getting the most out of every transistor than nvidia as well it seems...

but looking at the specs...
1280sps will be enough to reach 5850s 1440sp performance?
that would be a performance boost of around 12%?
thats not too much... you could get that with clockspeeds alone
765->850mhz...
so then whats the point of rolling out new silicon?
cause its a 10% smaller chip?
idk... this sounds weird... that wouldnt really make sense...

if those die sizes are correct, then performance HAS to be higher... otherwise it wouldnt make sense to roll out new silicon...
it has to be at least as fast as a 5870... at least...

think about it, a 512sp 480 is how much faster than a 5870?
bart should have roughly the same perf boost as cayman, so it wouldnt be going from 5830 to 5850, thats a rather small boost... it should go from 5830 to 5870+
I dunno Saaya, i think every mm^2 counts especially if the chip is gonna be used in sub-200 US$ segment, and considering supply problem that has been plaguing ATi for since the launch of Evergreen family, this will help alleviating that problem somehow.

Regarding performance, i think ~HD 5850 can be counted as being conservative, with 320*4 config, if this rearrangement is successfull, we can expect ~HD 5870 like performance in many occasions, and good performance is not only determined by max & avg FPS, i expect some decent improvements in min FPS & a competitive tesselation performance in these upcoming chips from ATi.

Well, i guess these speculations are rather leaning on an optimist side, but considering what ATi has achieved since HD 2900 debacle, the optimism is quite warranted. In this scenario, nVidia's only competitive in the mainstream segment (GF 104 is pretty good chip, especially if the full spec one can be produced in good quantity), but would have much less profit & incentive to play the price war game in maintaining market share.